I just learned about this open letter to President Obama, asking him to consider open source for governmental initiatives.

Open-source software brings transparency to software development. There are no “black boxes” in open-source software and therefore no need to guess what is going on “behind the scenes.” Ultimately, this means a better product for everyone, because there is visibility at every level of the application, from the user interface to the data implementation. Furthermore, open-source software provides for platform independence, which makes quick deployments that benefit our citizens much easier and realistic.

For these reasons, we urge you to make it mandatory to consider the source of an application solution (open or closed) as part of the government’s technology acquisition process, just as considering accessibility by the handicapped is required today (as defined by section 508).

I can’t wait to see where this goes.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 12th, 2009 at 1:31 pm by Nicole C. Engard and is filed under Government, Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.